Time to take a deep breath.

After publishing Where's Yoda? last week and amusing myself and, I hope, others with alternate approaches to a solution, I turned my attention on Saturday to closing out the Plato's Five Gems series. I had the kids for the afternoon at Edinborough Park in Edina (and of course checked for nearby park'n'grabs, but the timing didn't work out), so I was free for a little while on Saturday evening to place Dodecahedron and Bunganator's Grand Slam.

I had previously released Octahedron, Icosahedron, Tetrahedron, and Cube, and so I returned to those caches to drop off clues for the Grand Slam. When I returned to my marked location for Dodecahedron, I was alarmed that the coordinates were a good bit off, but I hope that the geobeacon that the cache sits in will announce its presence enough to forgive some fluky coordinates. It's hard to juggle coordinate changes and the fact the puzzles are closely tied to the digits.

The Grand Slam cache was fun to place, because the cache itself is an icosahedral die. A very small number of cachers have the clues from all four of the old caches in the series (I'm emailing them to previous finders on request), so it could be a while until Grand Slam is found.

It was a little nerve-wracking Sunday and Monday, because I placed Dodecahedron too close to an unsubmitted cache that of course I was unaware of. But thanks to some mysterious and much appreciated dealings between our hard-working local cache reviewer and a gracious fellow cache hider, Dodecahedron was allowed to nestle in among its friends.

I must say, for the record, that I believe cache hiders should not be allowed to hold a location by reporting a cache but not submitting it. Priority should be given to the first to submit, not the first to report. That said, it has happened to me twice out of nine hides so far, and it has worked out for the best in both circumstances.

This is particularly bothersome for folks who hide mainly puzzle caches, because often the puzzles have to be reworked if the final location is changed.

Sunday Millah and I headed to Lakeville, mainly to finish off Bunganator's Climb On series of puzzle caches about rock climbing. We tried to pick off some traditionals in the area, too, and toward the end of the trip, we realized that we had around 25 finds and that I might be close to 300. Turns out, I was at 297 at the end of the day, so this morning I grabbed two on the way to Millah's puzzle cache Read 'Em And Weep, which came out of King Boreas' awesome Jukebox Hero seed cache.

Time to take a deep breath. Nine cache hides feels like plenty right now.